Walk This Way

There is one indisputable fact about robots — they are cool. Adult and child alike love robots, and those that are so inclined often take on the project of trying to build one of their own. Those that do quickly learn another indisputable fact about robots — they are challenging. Challenging to build, challenging to control… just plain challenging. Seemingly insurmountable difficulties turn many away, feeling that robotics must just not be for them.

Four years ago, George Konidaris co-founded Realtime Robotics, a company seeking to solve the problem of motion control for robots. Their solution, the Realtime controller, is a device that gives robots the ability to quickly adjust their path to avoid obstacles as they move towards a goal. The Realtime controller is designed with universality in mind. It can connect to a variety of robots and is designed to work in diverse environments.

Rather than deal with the minutiae of moving a robot — move this actuator five degrees, capture an image, detect objects, determine next step based on sensor readings, etc. — the user commands are simplified to the point of telling the robot to move from point A to point B.

The controller takes advantage of a new type of computer chip designed by Realtime Robotics that is optimized to perform the frequent collision tests needed to move a robot about. These chips can perform many of these types of calculations in parallel.

At a high level, the Realtime controller does for robot hardware what reusable libraries do for software development. In the early days of computing, when software was developed primarily in assembly language, and nearly all functionality was custom built to the task, it was far more difficult to develop complex software than it is today. In today’s world, a software engineer can develop applications in high level languages and implement very complex portions of the functionality by simply calling a function from a pre-built library.

At present, most of Realtime’s customers are in the automotive, manufacturing, and logistics industries. I hope that in the future the technology will evolve to the point where it can be made available to hobbyists. The barriers that it removes could help to raise up an entire new generation of roboticists to lead transformational change in the field.